Tobias Wolff Reads Denis Johnson

I’d like to strongly recommend that you listen to this month’s fiction podcast, in which Tobias Wolff reads Denis Johnson’s story, “Emergency,” which appeared in the magazine in 1991; Wolff is then expertly interrogated by our fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. My attention often drifts during readings, but Wolff’s voice has this melodious and steely combination that simultaneously coaxes and commands my focus.

Among other things, Treisman and Wolff talk about the almost accidental nature of the emergence of the story. Johnson, Treisman says, “was just writing down some anecdotes and bar stories he’d told, and not necessarily constructing this as a masterwork of literature.” It was a bit of a surprise that one of the touchstones of the contemporary short story emerged. This seems appropriate when we talk about Denis Johnson, a writer whose stories seem so desperate, whose narrators exist so much in the margins, and yet who has become a writer comfortably in the accepted canon of modern literature.

In a bit of ironic disclosure, I should tell you that Deborah is my boss in the fiction department. I tell you this because the podcast got me thinking about the nature of what we do, and how it coexists with what writers do. There’s a similar lack of intentionality, though it comes from different sources. We publish almost fifty stories a year, and like them all, and some of them we think are just completely awesome. But we go on to the next one, since that’s our job, and then some years go by and we look back and realize, wow, that one was a classic.